


MYEYNL Extras: Frankincense, Myrrh, and Eggstirbakin

by aimmyarrowshigh



Series: May You Enjoy Your New Life [6]
Category: One Direction (Band)
Genre: Alternate Universe, Alternate Universe - Domestic, Christmas, Family Fluff, M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-05-31
Updated: 2013-05-31
Packaged: 2017-12-13 12:56:21
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,020
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/824540
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/aimmyarrowshigh/pseuds/aimmyarrowshigh
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>TIMESTAMP FOR <a href="http://higherarrowsfic.livejournal.com/1011.html">May You Enjoy Your New Life</a>. <i>On the Christmas Eve that Louis turns thirty -- <i>thirty</i>; it doesn’t seem possible – Millie has just turned eleven, Lux has just put a blue streak in Millie’s hair at a sleepover, and the only thing on her Christmas list is “a tattoo.”</i></p><div class="center">
  <p>***</p>
</div><b>REQUEST A MYEYNL EXTRA!</b> <a href="http://aimmyarrowshigh.tumblr.com/submit">Submit a MYEYNL-esque photo on my Tumblr (no text prompts)</a> and I will write you a MYEYNL outtake, timestamp, or scene coda.  They may be short (but at least 100 words) or long, depending on how much time and inspiration I have.
            </blockquote>





	MYEYNL Extras: Frankincense, Myrrh, and Eggstirbakin

**Author's Note:**

  * Inspired by [May You Enjoy Your New Life](https://archiveofourown.org/works/824494) by [aimmyarrowshigh](https://archiveofourown.org/users/aimmyarrowshigh/pseuds/aimmyarrowshigh). 



> **Character/Relationships** : Harry/Louis, mentions of Zayn/Perrie and Liam/Danielle  
>  **Rating** : G  
>  **Warnings** : None.  
>  **Story Wordcount** : 2,050  
>  **Disclaimer** : We don't own anything. No claim of knowledge or veracity is made towards anyone in the story and no aspersions or claims of character are to be inferred. We have no connection nor permissions from One Direction, X-Factor, Simon Cowell, SyCo Inc., Sony, ITV, or Columbia Records. No libel intended.  
>  **Notes** : There isn't really a _plot_ to this; it's just a moment in time in the future of Millieverse's characters. It does include some future headcanon for them, in case people were curious; I'm posting it because I'm so hugely, hugely grateful to the people who have read MYEYNL (and/or any of my other fic this past year) and enjoyed it. Have a really, really happy holiday, because writing fic for the members of this community has made me "enjoy my life" more this year.
> 
> ***
> 
> **REQUEST A MYEYNL EXTRA!** [Submit a MYEYNL-esque photo on my Tumblr (no text prompts)](http://aimmyarrowshigh.tumblr.com/submit) and I will write you a MYEYNL outtake, timestamp, or scene coda. They may be short (but at least 100 words) or long, depending on how much time and inspiration I have. 

** Frankincense, Myrrh, and Eggstirbakin **

On the Christmas Eve that Louis turns thirty -- _thirty_ ; it doesn’t seem possible – Millie has just turned eleven, Lux has just put a blue streak in Millie’s hair at a sleepover, and the only thing on Millie's Christmas list is “a tattoo.” For the hundredth time, there’s a chameleon lost somewhere in their house, and Harry is fairly sure that the cat is in love with a neighborhood stray.

Being thirty, Louis thinks, is exhausting, and when he says it aloud to Harry across the gap of their bed, he’s only been thirty for half an hour.

“You don’t know that,” Harry soothes. But what does he know? He’s only twenty-seven. Harry wriggles closer to Louis and knocks their toes together beneath the heavy winter blankets. “It might suddenly get easy, being thirty. You’re a proper adult, so maybe you’re wise now. D’you feel wise?”

Louis flops until he has an arm wrapped around Harry’s waist, hand tucked under Harry’s t-shirt to pet the skin of his belly, and pushes his face into the warmth between Harry’s shoulder blades. “I’ve no compunction to go give Amana frankincense and myrrh, if that’s an answer.”

Harry laughs softly and reaches behind himself to rub Louis’ arm. “You can’t possibly be upset that Zayn and Perrie had a baby nearly on your birthday. You can’t be that petty; you’re thirty.”

“I already had to share with Jesus,” Louis grumps, but they both know he’s kidding. “No, I’m happy for them. And it’s not suspicious at all that they waited until Millie’s just old enough to babysit.”

“Not in the slightest,” Harry agrees. He lifts Louis’ hand and kisses his wrist. “Cheer up. I don’t want to share my bed with a grumpy old man.”

Louis kicks at the back of Harry’s ankle with his sharp toenails and Harry yelps once before they both dissolve in quiet laughter. It isn’t a joke they could have made four years ago – not after Millie turned seven and One Direction went on their second hiatus in as many years and Harry and Louis stopped being so sure that they hadn’t outgrown each other as much as they’d outgrown red trousers and blue blazers. And Louis had moved out, for almost a year. And Harry had dated someone else; a few someone elses but one in particular for long enough that Millie had crawled into Louis’ lap one weekend she was at his flat and asked whether he was _never_ going to come home.

He had, obviously. Because Harry stopped being an idiot, Louis still privately thinks. In little pieces, day by day, he’d moved back to their home: a jumper left on the coatrack, a pair of shoes in the front cupboard, a toothbrush beside Harry’s next to the sink, until finally he was where he belonged. 

It isn’t like he’d never been gone, and never will be again, but it’s better to know that they aren’t just together for the sake of a tiny baby neither of them alone could handle. 

Harry and Louis fit together because they are _Harry and Louis_ , not because they’re Millie’s parents. And when they reconnected, they did solely as a couple, because for any ills Louis might think Harry had in their off year, he never forgot how important Louis and Millie are in each other’s lives. Even as important as One Direction had been in theirs – and how important One Direction Louis had been to One Direction Harry – it was good confirmation to know that just plain Harry loved Louis even more. They no longer _needed_ each other, but they _wanted_ all the more for it.

Harry rolls over to face Louis, and Louis tucks his hands up under Harry’s t-shirt again to keep them warm, resting on the patchwork of tattoos that Harry’s accumulated over the years. Most have to do with Millie; some are shared with the rest of One Direction. A few are shared only with Louis, because only Louis knows where they are. 

“Well, I guess that settles it.” Louis’ voice is soft and gentle and fond. “I’ll have to stay young and not-grumpy forever, then.”

“Or I could get old and grumpy with you,” Harry points out. “But thirty isn’t old. You thought twenty was old, once upon a time.”

“Oh god, am I so ancient that my own life stories have a ‘once upon a time’ in them?” Louis pushes his face into Harry’s chest. “Let’s not speak of it. I don’t want to do my birthday this year. I’ll be twenty-nine forever. Let’s just have Christmas and skip the 24th.”

Kissing the top of Louis’ head, Harry says, “Can’t do that, I’m afraid. It’ll be great, Lou. I bet you will turn wise. You can grow a shaggy, white beard and let one of your eyes go sideways and wear a tinfoil hat.”

“That’s not being wise,” Louis says. “That’s being a villain from the old Doctor Who.”

Harry laughs and cuddles Louis closer. He brings the blankets with him so they’re wrapped up tight against the cold air. “You’re right. Silly me. See? You’re already wiser.”

“Knowing about television does not make me wise,” Louis grumps, but settles against Harry’s chest to sleep. “But you’re kind to lie.”

A stripe of light through the blinds catches across one of Harry’s eyes, making the green shine bright gold in the dark, as he tilts his face down to catch his lips lightly against Louis’ mouth. “I’m not lying.”

Louis follows as Harry pulls away, chasing down another pack of kisses. “I love you.”

The gold eye blinks, drowsy. “I love you, too, Lou. Happy birthday.”

In the morning, Louis wakes to the smell of bacon and the smell of dog breath, the weight of a girl and a cat dipping the mattress, and the lovelorn screech of a cockatiel from downstairs. 

“Happy Birthday, Mup! Wake up while your food’s hot!”

Louis grumbles once into the pillow before rolling over and giving Millie a sleepy smile. She looks fresh as a daisy, awake for hours, with her brown-and-blue curls in a riot around her face. She’s drawn a massive dragon constellation on her arm in black Sharpie to demonstrate how _sick_ she’d look with a tattoo, but neither Harry nor Louis is budging on the issue. Her glasses, acquired last year, sit askew on her nose. Right next to Louis’ face, Reginald’s doggy bum is waggling as she paws at the pillows, kneading them into a more suitable position for rather-old-dog napping. There’s a soft _shhhush_ near the dresser as a cat tail – Pooper-Scooper has been renamed “Scoop Catt” as a concession to both Millie’s preteen vanity and Harry’s love of terrible jokes that are not funny – flicks and swishes against the wood.

“Sit up!” Millie urges. She bounces a little on the mattress. “I made you breakfast.”

“Did you really?” Louis asks. He rolls over and lets Millie fluff his pillows for him, since she loves birthdays as much as her father does. “All by yourself?”

As parents, Harry and Louis are alternately encouraging of her independence and, maybe, too protective and a little stifling. Given their lives as former teen stars and Millie’s frequent, but not steady, presence as a youth TV presenter, it’s easy to focus on all of the negatives – threats and insults and sleazy backstage rumors about producers and worrying pieces of mail that find their way to their actual doorstep, even past all the gates, and forget about what a good head Millie has on her shoulders. She might have frivolous tastes, like blue hair and electric purple glasses and meaningless tattoos, but she’s always been bright, mature, and ready to stand up for herself and those around her.

(Mary M, back at nursery, is not the only person Millie has punched in the face in the name of self-defense, and won’t be the last. But she’s at least more judicious with her reasoning now.)

Millie nods. “Well, I mean, I bought the bread, didn’t bake it. And Dad helped with the sausage and bacon, ‘cause meat’s gross. But I made the eggs.”

Louis’ lips twitch. “Eggstirbakin?”

Millie rolls her eyes. “You’re so embarrassing. It’s not my fault I couldn’t talk right as a baby.”

“You were adorable,” Louis says. “Come up and give me a hug for my birthday.”

Reginald barks, ill-tempered with age, as Millie’s scrambling dislodges her from her napping place. She settles down next to Louis and rests her head against the side of his arm after he’s pulled up the breakfast tray laden with fried eggs, bacon, sausage, and –

“Little Bean, I’m not eating kale.”

“It’s good for you,” Millie insists. “And delicious.”

“Your vegetarian ways,” Louis grumbles. “You _and_ the Paynes. You’re all pains.”

“Ugh,” Millie grunts. “You make that joke like, every day. You’re so embarrassing, Mup.”

“Who’s there to be embarrassed in front of right now, the cat?” Louis asks around a mouthful of egg. He swallows, wipes his lips, and kisses the side of Millie’s head. “Very good eggstirbakin, bean.”

Harry comes into the room, still in his pyjamas, and sets tea mugs and a massive plate of toast with jam on the bedside table so they can all eat their Christmas Eve breakfast. A second tray with two more breakfast plates – only scrambled eggs with beans and kale, since Harry has kept his promise to her to stop eating pork, although he hasn’t gone fully vegetarian like Millie has – fits alongside Louis’, and Harry yawns as he settles back against the headboard.

“They are good eggs,” he agrees. “Glad you can make your own now, Bean. Louis, how many eggs d’you think we’ve made Millie in her lifetime?”

Millie tilts her head, crunching on crispy kale. She still looks mostly like Harry, but there are bits of her face becoming less like him every day as she gets older: her cheeks are rounder, her nose has a turn-up at the end. She has big, bushy eyebrows now that seem to have sprouted out of nowhere, although Gemma says that they run in the family. Her own children are adopted, though, so she can’t prove it without letting her own go ungroomed. (She’s staunchly refused.) 

And Millie won’t have a blood sibling, either – although Harry and Louis have, recently, begun pondering raising another child, it would be biologically Louis’ and born through a surrogate. Something about it makes Louis feel a little sad, and he can’t quite place why. He knows Harry would love it as much as he himself loves Millie. He knows Millie would love it as much as he loves his sisters.

But he just doesn’t think they _need_ anyone else to make a family, he thinks now. He’s always known what it took Harry so long to figure out, that Millie is just as much his. They’ve never needed to share blood for that, when they share everything else so much more important.

“How many eggs have I made for Bean in her lifetime?” Louis thinks back to the murkiest, most insignificant firsts, scrambling up eggs for tiny Millie in her high chair while Harry was dating Caroline or – whatever their names were, the other girls who never lasted. 

No one’s lasted but Louis. 

And Millie, of course.

Their little ragtag family, chameleon and all.

He nudges Harry with one elbow and rumples Millie’s hair with the other hand. “Ten thousand. A million. Entirely too many.”

Millie frowns mightily and abandons her kale to rest her chin on Louis’ shoulder. “No! Not nearly enough.”

Harry’s arm stretches around Louis’ shoulders to muss through Millie’s hair, straightening out the blue streak between his fingers. “Not enough, hmm? Mup just needs to cook your eggs for you even though you can do it yourself?”

“Yeah!”

“She’s right, H,” Louis says, and puts his arms around both Styleses. “However many I’ve made, it’s not enough yet. I suppose I’ll have to stay here and make eggstirbakin – ”

“No bacon,” Millie interrupts.

“Hush, I know. Anyway, I’ll have to make you both eggs forever.”

[](http://statcounter.com/free-web-stats/)


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